Everything but the Coffee (20 page)

University of Houston business school professor Jackie Kacen discovered similar patterns. In a paper she wrote on retail therapy and shopping cures, she noted that both men and women self-gift in the postneed world, but she also found that they bought different things. Women purchased far more clothes, for instance, than men. Men, how-ever, spent more on bigger-ticket items. Kacen speculated that these contrasts reflected, in her words, “differences in discretionary income and earning power between men and women in the US.” So when it comes to Starbucks, perhaps it was its relative affordability and convenience that made it a viable self-gifting venue for women.
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Other factors further explain the gendered appeals of Starbucks as a place for self-gifting. This starts with the drinks. A Brooklyn teenager told me a story about a boy who liked her and wanted to ask her out on a date. To impress her, he ordered a plain black coffee at Starbucks.
Why I asked? Because, she laughed, “it is more manly.” When women self-gift at Starbucks, they usually order milky, frothy concoctions, drinks that a contributor on Urbandictionary.com described as “decorated or girly in nature.” Sensing this gendered dynamic, in 2006, Burger King tried to carve out a place for itself in the burgeoning take-away coffee market. It called its new drink “BK Joe” and packaged it as a kind of brawny alternative to Starbucks. Burger King customers, insisted Denny Post, the company’s former “chief concept officer,” “don’t want it to be complicated, like a chai half-decaf whatever. They just want it to be straightforward. This is not frou-frou coffee.” To hammer the point home, BK Joe ads featured a construction worker wearing a helmet and workboots, drinking coffee that another ad said, poking more fun at Starbucks, came in “three easy-to-say sizes” (large, medium, and small).
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Clearly in this reading, functional, utilitarian coffee (and Burger King) were male, and Frappuccinos and Starbucks were female, a “girl thing,” as one blogger called it.
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Television sitcoms and Hollywood films often portray women’s shopping—especially when it comes to purchasing Vanilla Lattes, shoes, and chocolates—as frivolous. Think of the image of the irrational shopaholic—say, Grace from
Will and Grace
—twisted up in a knot of Macy’s and Bloomingdale bags. But looking at women buying lattes for themselves at Starbucks reveals more about rational, not irrational, purchasing calculations and about personal politics and the social meanings of gender. “If you live in a patriarchal society,” Sharon Zukin, the author of
Point of Purchase: How Shopping Changed American Culture
, explained to me, “you shop for others and you get your treats from men.” Through self-gifting, Zukin suggests, women say to themselves and others, “I deserve it”—the “it” being a not-too-expensive indulgence, a little time, or a small dose of relief from the endless everyday pressures of work, house-hold and child management, budgeting, and even dieting in postneed middle-class America.
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For some women, then, Starbucks has become a way to broadcast their self-worth and self-possession, and, in some cases, to deliver a muted feminist critique of the hectoring and finger-wagging
advice coming at them all the time from supermarket magazines and cable station commentators. But again, these acts typically take place in the private realm, on cushy couches away from the public arena of political debate and discussion, thereby leaving untouched, in most cases, the gender conventions that this kind of buying might challenge.

A SHORT HISTORY OF SELF-GIFTING

In
The Social Meaning of Money
, Princeton University sociologist Viviana Zelizer challenges conventional thinking about the market and rationality. From Marx to Weber, commentators have treated all purchases as the same: as rational, utility-driven calculations. They don’t see much value in the emotional or personal. Through her extensive research, however, Zelizer uncovers a long, curvy, and complicated history of how people “earmark” and spend their money. Husbands and wives, she finds, regularly stashed away small coins and bills as “me money.”
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When no one is looking, they might buy a little something for them-selves. They turn shopping into fun, not work; money into a reward, not a master. Obviously, the self-gifting that goes on at Starbucks isn’t new, and neither is buying for pleasure new.
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It, too, has a history. How people self-gift or what they spend their me money on, and how these purchases shift with social and economic changes and transformations in ideas about family and gender, can tell us a lot about what we care about and desire and how we define, regulate, and talk about economic rationality and self-worth at a given moment.

In 1992, trend watcher Faith Popcorn noticed a sharp uptick in what she described as “therapeutic” purchases of “small indulgences.” Just as Starbucks moved full-force out of Seattle, she observed “a
militancy
about self indulgence now, a strong sense of entitlement. It’s not ‘Oh, what I would give for [insert your fantasy here],’ it’s ‘I want it.’ ‘I will
have
it. And I
deserve
it.’ ”
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Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske noticed a similar trend, particularly among women. To get a handle on shifting consumer desires, the
two executives from the Boston Consulting Group crunch numbers on retail sales and monitor home prices. They also have a touch of the ethnographer in them. As part of their research, they watch what people buy, interview them about their purchases, and talk with them in their living rooms and on their back decks. (For instance, Silverstein did the in-depth interview with stay-at-home mom Sarah Montford mentioned in the chapter opening.) According to Silverstein and Fiske’s careful estimate, Americans spent $350 billion in 2003 on Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, three-hundred-count cotton sheets, Kiehl’s hand and eye creams, and hundreds of other small indulgences.
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In their book
Trading Up
, they point to higher incomes, more women in the workforce, and rising home values as the key drivers behind the national spending spree that others have called “luxurification” and “affluenza.” At the same time, “everyday low prices” at Wal-Mart reduced what families spent on staples like toilet paper, pickles, and car batteries. In his book
The Wal-Mart Effect
, business journalist Charles Fishman estimates that the average American family saves $2,000 a year because of the bargains offered by the retail giant.
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But, as Silverstein and Fiske note and as the economic meltdown of 2008 showed rather dramatically, upper-middle-class consumers didn’t squirrel away this money in their saving accounts or give it to charities. They spent it on lattes and other luxuries often bought on credit.

More than straightforward economic issues drove the purchase of small indulgences. In their conversations with consumers, Silverstein and Fiske noticed what they termed the “I’m worth it” phenomenon, a newish cultural permission especially pronounced among women to spend on themselves and do so out in the open. This shift didn’t come out of nowhere. It surely had to do with more than the emergence of the luxury economy, everyday discounts, and easy credit—the reasons Silverstein and Fiske cite. The rise in self-gifting stems, at least in part, from the frenzied pace of American life, the amount of working, driving, and activities Americans do (and sign their kids up to do). We are a nation running ourselves ragged—especially women, who usually bear the double (and then some) burden of paid labor and domestic labor. So a little break, a
little bit of respite, is much needed and
well
worth it. Because they are worth it and their time is worth it, female consumers regularly treat themselves to a gift or a little time off from the monotony of cooking and cleaning or just a few moments of fun—a small indulgence as a rational reward or maybe as a useful incentive to keep up the frenzied pace.

•  •  •

Without fully acknowledging these social forces, Silverstein and Fiske see Oprah Winfrey behind the trend toward frequent self-gifting. They identify the talk-show host and one-woman multimedia enterprise as the powerful popularizer and great enabler for women’s “I’m worth it”/“I deserve respect” latte buying.
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Turns out, Oprah is a Starbucks fan, and Starbucks is a fan of Oprah. At their splashy annual stockholders’ meetings, Starbucks’ officials show clips from the previous year of scenes where the company’s stores, cups, and logo appeared in films and on television. In one of these, Oprah yelled on her show, “Yay, Starbucks.”
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The identification between Starbucks and Oprah demonstrated something of the coffee company’s connection with women and the American mainstream in the 1990s. While just about everyone seems to respect Oprah, the foundation of her fan base comes from women from the nation’s broad middle class, showing once again how Starbucks had steadily expanded its appeal through the Starbucks moment. When it comes to her core audience, Oprah, as Silverstein and Fiske note, recognizes the pressures in most women’s lives. That is key to the bond between her and her fans: she understands them, and they respond to her empathy. Making me even more intrigued by the Winfrey-Starbucks connection, Meredith, the Christian mom and occasional Starbucks user from Louisiana introduced in the chapter’s opening, judged Oprah the “most influential woman of our day.” If she could spend an evening with anyone who lived in the last thousand years, she wrote, she would choose the talk-show host.

To find out more about what business experts Silverstein and Fiske and cautious consumer Meredith were talking about when it came to
Oprah, gender, and buying, I went to Oprah’s Web page. She does talk about self-gifting, even if she doesn’t use that exact term. For instance, Oprah tells her fans to “pamper” themselves. But when she does, she tells them not to engage in simple self-indulgence but to reward their work, time, and contributions to their families and to pay attention to themselves a little. Self-denial, she maintains, can be just as dangerous as overindulgence. When Oprah is not urging viewers to take care of themselves and respect themselves with an occasional gift, someone else is. Her Web site once featured Wynona Judd’s journal entries. Under the heading “Putting Myself on the List,” the country singer explained that she sets aside fifteen minutes every day for herself. Linda Patch, a regular
Oprah
viewer, writes with almost militant defiance about her retail therapy, “You can call me selfish. I am really not threatened by that word any more.” Freed from this guilt, she declared that she “deserves some me time and me things.”
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Patch doesn’t put Starbucks on her “for me” list, but other Oprah fans do. Against the chilling backdrop of what she called the “frightening realities of our age: terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, pollution, domestic violence, psychotic criminals who steal children right from their own beds,” best-selling writer and Oprah-anointed life coach Martha Beck still managed in 2005 to find “ten reasons to feel good about the future.” In an article published in Oprah’s
O Magazine
, she put “feminism” at the very top of her list. Next came “Starbucks Mocha Malt Frappuccino, with whipped cream.” “Yes, it’s odd,” Beck acknowledged, “that my list leaps from an enormous social movement to a slug of caffeine dressed in heaps of fat and sugar. But when the big things fragment our energy and optimism, it’s the little things that put us back together. Peaceful revolutionaries change the world by great effort and small comforts. Today, Mocha Malt Frappuccino is my favorite splurge. What’s yours?”
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“I can’t live without my cuppa Starbucks Toffee Nut Latte, if I’ve had a hard day at work,” one mother wrote to Oprah. Caroline told Oprah that she wanted to shed thirty pounds, but she couldn’t always get her-
self into the gym—that is, until she turned Starbucks into the reward carrot paired with the workout stick. Knowing that she gets a frothy drink after exercising, she can now get herself onto the Stairmaster and treadmill. “In an incredibly insecure world,” wrote another viewer (sounding a lot like Martha Beck), “people are trying to add more value and meaningfulness to everything they do, so if a cup of coffee could [give] them a moment of ‘feel good’ then a dollar here and there would hardly make a difference.”
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It is difficult to know what the consumer persuaders at Starbucks are up to or what they watch on TV or what Web pages they surf. They aren’t the most talkative bunch, at least not in public. If they do tune into
Oprah
, that’s their secret. But clearly they know how to market their products to women, busy self-gifters, and others seeking quick and valuable doses of retail therapy.

“Treat yourself—or anyone else—with the most convenient way to enjoy Starbucks—a Starbucks card.” “Inspire. Reward. Indulge.” These are how two advertisements for the Starbucks gift card begin. “Green tea beverages,” promises a company promotion, “are the perfect way to treat your-self.” United Kingdom public relations writers described a Strawberries & Crème Frappuccino, developed to create an association between the coffee company and the Wimbledon tennis tournament, as “an indulgent and creamy creation.” Banana Coco-Mocha Chip Frappuccinos and Eggnog Lattes delivered, the company promised, “sophisticated coffee indulgence[s].” Other beverages came with “indulgent touches.” “Indulge in the richness of Starbucks Hot Gourmet Cocoa,” another promotion urged customers. A Caramel Macchiato, vowed an in-store sign, “will indulge your senses.” Another claimed, “My drink is like a mental back rub.”
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In January 2005, Starbucks introduced Chantico, a dense and oozy six-ounce drinkable chocolate dessert. “It’s about taking time for me,” a company spokesperson told a reporter. “It’s about one of those ‘ahh’ moments, and self-indulgence in a really small way.”
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Loaded with 390 calories and 21 grams of fat, maybe the drink was too indulgent, too big
of a reward in too small of a cup. Or maybe it wasn’t big enough or rich enough. Starbucks discontinued Chantico in 2006. A year later, the company launched two new summer beverages: Dolce de Leche Latte and Dolce de Leche Frappuccino. “Topped with whipped cream and a dusting of toffee sprinkles,” read a company description, “Starbucks’ version of this traditional delicacy is a luxurious tasty treat.”
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Then with revenues dropping and its stock price falling, in the spring of 2008, the company tried to kick-start business with the introduction of two “refreshing low calorie” but still “indulgent” frozen, smoothie-type drinks called Vivanno.
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